A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  If Shadow and the boys had been caught already, and had talked, Riveroma would just have killed them and taken the parts of Jak he wanted. If they had accomplished their mission, Riveroma would be running. But if, as seemed most likely, Shadow and the boys were still at large, more delay—besides, if Riveroma only held Dujuv, he would be safe until Jak was recaptured. “Uh, yeah,” Jak said. “Those are my conditions. Untie my hands and let us both live.”

  Riveroma leveled his laser at Dujuv. “Suppose I shoot him now and then we’ll only have to discuss untying you.”

  “No.”

  “You see how it is. I just don’t think that helping me—much as I truly do need the help—is really your priority.” Riveroma poked Duj’s belly with the laser a couple of times and said, “Now, how do you feel about that, Dujuv? You could go on breathing, you know. And I have rather a better record of keeping my word than your ostensible friend does of keeping his.”

  “Up yours.”

  “Touching. A historical quotation. Who’d have thought a panth had that in him?”

  Riveroma was trying to infuriate them. What could he get out of that? Uncle Sib—who had known Bex Riveroma for more than a century—always said that though Riveroma was an amoral butcher, he was also a complete pro. He never did things just to be nasty, unless you counted existing.

  So there was some reason he wanted them both angry and not thinking straight.

  “I don’t see why you balk at the cost to get everything you want,” Jak said. “Our other team was only about five minutes from their objective when you picked us up. If I tell you about it, you might have to scramble, but you could probably still undo what they’ve done, as long as you act within—well, weehu, my purse went and suicided when your heets tried to hack it, you know, so I couldn’t exactly say how long you have. But knowing where the evidence was, either for the burning armchair case or about Titan’s Dancer, ought to be worth taking off a pair of cuffs.” Jak was gambling that Riveroma couldn’t afford to have his past crimes discussed with fifty MLB malphs listening in.

  “Perhaps we should work something out,” Riveroma said, his voice slurring slightly—was he furious? Or was he laughing at Jak?

  The fifteen-wheeler was slowing to a stop at the main gate to the central pinnacle.

  “Look,” Jak said. “My Uncle Sibroillo always said you were a man of honor and reason.”

  “He did?”

  “I speck because he always admired your skills and your record, sir.” Best not to lay it on any thicker than that. The two men despised each other, but each believed that the other one was secretly in awe of him. That had led Sib to do some stupid things in the past; Jak just had to hope that Riveroma would prove equally susceptible. “Anyway, sir, here’s what I was thinking. We do it in a series of trades. My arms really are killing me, so you could undo my bonds. As soon as you do, I tell you what the main party has done, and how you can undo it. Then you release Dujuv. Then I let you knock me out to take the sliver, and trust you to take it in the way that lets me wake up afterward—which you do, and then wake me up. You go on your way having gotten everything you really want. We get to keep our lives. Everybody wins, except these poor stupid Mercurial bastards, who neither of us cares about anyway. And chances are that neither of us sees the other one for a good long time, which I bet you’d like as much as I would.”

  “That begins to sound like a deal,” Riveroma said. “Now, how does either of us know that the other will keep his part of the bargain?”

  “We don’t, toktru. But if you untie me and I don’t tell you the truth, you tie me up again. If I tell you the truth and you don’t release Dujuv, I fight you for the sliver and you take your chances it gets damaged. Like that.”

  Riveroma leaned back against one of the guardrails and looked around. The harsh glare of lights and darks, and the weird jagged landscape of pits and spires, piles and smears, reflected from the gold of his faceplate; his silver pressure suit was a zebra pattern of light and dark wrinkles. “Worth a try. All right, unfasten his hands.”

  Some flunky moved behind Jak, and he felt the release. Not even drawing a breath first, Jak jumped as hard as he could over the rail, and ran. A laser spot flared on the rock ahead to his left, leaving a blue dot in his vision and a drooling red spot on the parking area.

  Over the general frequency, Jak heard a scream of “No!,” a crackle of shattering locks and seals, a dull foom!, and a brief harsh whistle of air. Riveroma had forced the man’s helmet off, killing him with explosive decompression.

  “I’ll uncap any man who uses a weapon, is that clear?” Riveroma said. “Now catch that asshole. Alive.”

  Three hard bounds took Jak to the crack in the pinnacle. He grabbed a handhold and started up; unfortunately, a long fall and a suit rupture wouldn’t harm the sliver at all, despite their consequences for Jak, and therefore he needed to get to someplace where lassoing him or just knocking him down from the wall would be difficult. He climbed as fast as he’d ever climbed, taking chances he’d never have taken, and all the while he listened to MLB’s open channels. In the low gravity, wedged far back in the dark of the crevice, he could move quickly but many of the moves were mistakes, and as he scrabbled upward he showered the ground below him with rocks. He had no idea how much more of the clock he would need to run out, but he thought this way he’d be able to run out plenty. He grabbed, pushed, and pulled, as hard as he could, as fast as he could, and when he next looked around, he saw that he had at least reached a point where, even in Mercury’s low gravity, a fall was apt to be fatal.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Master of Principle 204

  Jak scrambled and climbed inward and upward; the farther back in the dark crevice he was, the harder he’d be to see, and if he was far enough up in a tight enough spot, he could surely keep them busy until Shadow and the boys did the data dump, or until the slagger went off.

  Presently he came to a corner; to his right, a wall rose up toward the patch of sky where he could just see one star glittering in the blackness. There was a dark patch on that wall about a meter above the level of his feet, and turning his head to make out its shape in the dim passive infrared, he concluded that it was a shallow depression in the wall behind a narrow shelf. It seemed as good a place for a stand as any.

  In the moderate grav, it was easy to jump up the distance sideways onto the shelf, but in the dark, twenty meters up, it was a nervous business. Gravel kicked out from under his feet and he went to his knees, deliberately falling forward into the shallow cave. With his head all the way inside, the passive infrared adjusted, and he could see that what was in front of him was a flat steel door.

  He turned back for an instant, looking out toward the rise of the crater wall in the distance, up along the slope of old melt and tailings. Why would there be a steel door here? It couldn’t be an escape route—he was more than high enough for a fall to kill anyone.

  It did have a good view through the mouth of the crevice to the surrounding plain. A gunport or sally port, then.

  A big rock dropped by the cave mouth, with a cry of “Sorry, heads,” through the headphones. Another party, hunting Jak, was descending the crevice from above. He was pinned between the two.

  He felt the thud at the same instant that the figure silhouetted in front of him. His hand grabbed the first rock that it came to, a big awkward one, and he shoved it in the general direction of the man in front of him.

  The heet had just landed, and the lip of the ledge was narrow and slippery. The rock, too big and too awkward to be much of a weapon normally, took him squarely in the crotch, and he fell backward into empty space. An alarm scream on the radio announced that the man’s rocable had activated, and a moment later a “Gotcha!” suggested that they had been able to catch it from the tower top and save the man—though he’d probably take a hard swing against the wall before he was hauled up.

  Jak snatched up a fist-sized rock and whipped it at the next man onto the ledge. It w
ent high and caught the man in the faceplate; he fell after the first, possibly unconscious, for this time there was no rocable alarm. Jak snatched up another rock.

  He felt a rumble in his feet, turned, saw the airlock door open and two heets in pressure suits coming through, continued his turn, sprang, and bounded into the first one, driving the rock into his front life-support pack, which flashed red. The heet fell over, twitching, and Jak brought the rock down on his second opponent’s helmet. It didn’t break, but it must have been like having your head inside a bucket when someone whacked it with a broom handle. The heet staggered, and Jak pushed past him into the airlock.

  The door entry box was pulsing with green lights. Jak hammered on it with the rock. It fell off the wall, and the emergency override slammed the door shut. Jak was alone in the airlock and with the control for the outer door destroyed, it would take them some time to get at him from that side.

  He switched on his helmet light and saw a big Makita hypervelocity gun, the size of a dining room table. Hyper-velocity guns threw a half-kilogram slug at around twelve kilometers per second, more than enough to wreck any vehicle up to and including small spacecraft; in the Military Basics course at the PSA, Jak had had a total of forty-five minutes on one of these, and it hadn’t been this manufacturer.

  At least it was easy to find the main power switch. The gun came alive with lights and began powering up. The plain old optical site on the thing must mean there was a way to fire it manually. Jak looked it over and threw every switch marked “arm” and pushed every dark button that said “power.” All the lights were green.

  He took a moment with the rock to hammer out the other door-opening control, the one for the inner door; he hoped this would mean that they’d have more trouble getting in, but probably there was a central control that could bypass the wall box, anyway. Well, all he needed to do was use up time.

  Now that there was air, his external suit mikes could pick up banging and thumping against the outside door. On the radio, a bunch of heets were all interrupting and shouting at each other about whether the airlock door that the central operator had just opened was the same as the airlock door that the pursuit party had wanted opened, or whether the pursuit party had asked for the wrong door.

  Jak decided not to wait for them to figure it out. He pointed the gun toward the center of the outer door, punched BURST and TEN HEX, hoping that those keys meant what he thought they did, made sure it was set to FIRE ON MANUAL, and hit FIRE.

  He remembered on Earth, at the Duke’s private preserve, he had once done some plinking, shooting old bottles and cans with a slug-thrower (it was an aristocratic activity he would never understand), and he’d shot a can that had turned out to have a lizard hiding in it; the can had flipped over a few times in the air and thudded to the ground, and the lizard had appeared to break the light-speed limit getting away. He’d felt really sorry for the lizard.

  Being in a small closed room with an operating hyper-velocity gun, firing a burst of ten, made him appreciate the lizard’s situation much more than ever. At least his ears were covered by the suit, and the mikes had cut out, but what conducted through his helmet was plenty.

  In front of him, the outer door now had ten doorknob-sized holes, their edges still glowing, forming two hexagons joined on a side, across its middle. The voice on the radio—faint in his deafened ears—demanded to know what the fuck had happened and why nobody was answering.

  Jak tried to rotate the gun with the idea that he might be able to do something similar with the inner door, causing more havoc and delay, but the gun would not swing any farther than the edges of the outer door, and whatever stops or intelligent controls blocked it, they weren’t visible or accessible. He tugged at the gun, yanked, pushed and kicked it, but it swung no farther.

  Riveroma’s voice spoke in his headphones. “So, now that you’ve killed five men and badly injured three, and established that I cannot trust you under any circumstances, perhaps you’d be willing to just sit still until we get you out of that airlock. We have you under surveillance and we can tell whether you move or not, so I would advise you not to. One of my clever technicians figured out we could use your dead purse as a null connection, and he has hacked into the life support and other controls for your pressure suit. By way of a demonstration—”

  Jak doubled over in agony.

  “You see? We can give you a pretty good shock anywhere you’re catheterized. Don’t worry. It does no permanent damage. I might yet decide to release you, and you can go back to amusing the princess with that. But meanwhile do keep in mind that I can make it feel as if you would rather lose it. Also—”

  Jak’s ears hurt, his eyes felt sore, he was choking and could not breathe. He thrashed around the room, crashing against the gun and back against the wall, before falling sideways to the floor.

  He could breathe again. His eyes and ears felt normal.

  “That was the argument that persuaded your friend Dujuv,” Riveroma said, very casually. “Just turning off the air supply for an instant and power-venting the suit. And I’m still exploring other unpleasant things I can do. Now, are you going to sit on the floor, with your legs extended in front of you, perfectly still, with your hands away from your body?”

  “Yes.” Jak had complied with each direction as Riveroma spoke it.

  “That’s a good boy.”

  Presently Jak felt a heavy thump through the floor plates. They must be mounting a temporary airlock on the other side. When the door opened, two men came through, grabbed him, forced him to his feet, frog-marched him into the airlock, and pressurized it. One of the men removed his own helmet, then grabbed Jak and tore the helmet off him.

  The man said, “You killed Preal Shafaritz with that stupid stunt. Remember that name, Preal Shafaritz. Repeat it.”

  “Preal Shafaritz.”

  “Thank you. He was my brother.”

  The man hit Jak, hard, in the face, the rough suit glove scraping his cheek and his head slamming back over the mounting collar. He hit Jak four more times, taking careful aim each time, making sure that he was hitting fresh skin, and spat on Jak’s face. “Put his helmet back on him,” he told his pizo.

  The other heet yanked the helmet back onto Jak as if dressing a mannequin.

  As soon as the helmet was on and the pressure came back up, Jak tried to switch on the face wipe. It didn’t work. “Hah,” Riveroma said, in his earphones. “You can live with that on your face for a while.”

  The two heets conducted Jak down a long corridor to an airlock elevator, shoved him into it, and took him all the way to the top. The doors opened on the treacherous, deep-pitted top of the central pinnacle. From here you could see all the way to the crater walls, five kilometers in all directions, and even a little beyond. They led Jak to the edge of a steep drop; Riveroma stood there. Beside him, Dujuv knelt at the very lip of the fifty-meter drop.

  “Kneel beside your friend and make sure you’re at least as close to the edge.”

  Jak did. He felt coldly certain that each of them was about to receive a laser cut across the back of the neck, and he was miserable to think he’d gotten Dujuv into this.

  “Well,” Riveroma said. “Well, well, well. Very impressive. You know, Jak, if I were Dujuv, I don’t think I would like you. He’s been taking a beating on your behalf more or less continually since you pulled your stupid little pointless stunt. And I think he rather believes you were just trying to save your own hide. Now that he’s seen you as you are—and since your entire record shows you don’t care in the slightest for or about Dujuv—this whole process will go so much more quickly.”

  Bex Riveroma is a slick liar, the master of Principle 204, Jak kept reminding himself. He always tells the lie that gets in under your skin and that’s hard not to believe. He gives your own worst thoughts back to you and makes you believe them.

  He hoped that Dujuv was remembering that too.

  He looked down. A simple roll forward would send Jak into
a long enough fall to die instantly on impact.

  “Are you listening, Jak? Are you listening, Dujuv?”

  They both agreed they were.

  “Well. I’m going to make use of my control of your suits. And I’m going to do things to each of you. Either you can endure it or you can say the magic phrase—Jak, for you that’s ‘Do it to Dujuv,’ or Dujuv, for you that’s ‘Do it to Jak.’ Then while I do, you will tell me what your friends in the other party are doing, and what I need to do to stop them.

  “You will tell me what I want to know, while your friend endures whatever it was that bothered you so much. Then I will kick your suffering friend’s back, hard, and he will fall to his death, and you will live because I will decide to let you.

  “You might notice, Jak, that although it’s not ideal for the sliver to undergo a heavy impact and sudden decompression, it is very conveniently safely wrapped in a few kilos of meat—that would be you—and is likely to survive the process. Not that I actually expect any noble self-sacrifice of you, and I don’t think Dujuv does, either, but it did seem like something that ought to be pointed out to you, just in case you have some tiny saving moment of decency and loyalty right at the end.”

  Jak looked down into the drop again. It must be at least fifty meters. In Mercury’s gravity, that would take more than five seconds to fall, and there would be a horrible first second in which you didn’t fall much farther than your own body length. The miners called it the “wake-up second,” when you had time for a last look at the place where you had been safe, a moment before.

  But at the end of fifty meters, with no air to slow you, you’d still hit at eighty kilometers per hour. In the back of his mind all of his math instructors seemed to gabble together in a nightmare of precision; doing ballistics in one’s head was normally a skill anyone who worked in space needed, but just now Jak would have been happy not to have it.